The 3 day conference in Amsterdam I’m going to attend end of this month turned out to be only 2 days long for the general public, because apparently some CxO’s need to have an extra day – way to go, The Next Web.
Also, their »I’m desperate to be part of the CxO day, please make an exception for me« form failed when submitting due to some flipping maintenance.

Then, I couldn’t unlock my German Telekom iPhone 4, because it’s an iPhone that I got from the German Telekom. Well, because you can not unlock iPhones from German Telekom before your contract ends, even if you’d be willing to pay them for that additionally.

And as if this wouldn’t be enough, it’s 2012 and it took me (admittedly stupid at times but not completely new to setting up stuff on computers) two and a half men hours to get my MacBook to work with my bloody new Samsung Wifi printer – that’s a lot of PITA time!

I can’t remember exactly when I bought my very first own hifi system, but it’s gotta be some 15 years ago. The Sony RX90 seemed like a nice machine and little did I know about all the nerdy stuff you can know and talk about hifi systems and how bad a compact system allegedly is. Well, for me it’s always been sufficient. That is it until very recently when I discovered that the CD changer started to make a strange clicking noise…

I chose to do what comes to me naturally and ignore it, but it came back to me and once you start to hear it even in the more noisy parts of some post rock songs you can’t really go back to unhearing it. So I pulled the pragmatic plug first and started to listen over the internal speakers of my Macbook which worked okayishly. Add some headphones for a change and you’re good to go for a couple of weeks.

Today however, it bothered me so much, that I decided to give it the attention it deserves – so I googled the problem. Turns out that there’ve actually been quite some people with problems with their CD changers in the RX90 – but again after some 15 years in more or less heavy daily use this seems legit.

Some guys on boards where talking about the rubber springs or v-belts or whatever you hifi-savvy guys might call it. So I removed some 9 screws and had a look into what seemed like a moon landscape. Removing all the dust brought up some very loose rubber bands that I replaced with some standard household ones as I didn’t want to start listening to CDs again, but simply wanted to get rid of this clicking sound that was driving me nuts.

Turns out that solved a problem I wasn’t actually facing anymore. So the CD tray comes out properly, goes in properly, spins around properly, but the annoying click remained – bummer.

After spinning some plastic cogs for half an hour, ending up in not only dirty but heavily sore fingers, I felt like I needed to continue on the pragmatic route and pull the plugs that connect the CD part with the tuner and the rest.

Now the clicking is gone, music’s crisp again – well, in absolute silence there’s some contact noise left, but I need to keep some stuff to do for the next weekends.

I guess the bottom line here is simple, generic and in no way new, but still nice to have had some sort of minor »epiphany« (if such a thing exists) on an otherwise rather lazy sunday: Sometimes, you just need to say goodbye to the old, obsolete technical stuff. Pull the plug, discontinue, deprecate and get over it…